I started laughing a little myself. Warm, good, crazy-the mix of emotions surging in me felt familiar, as if I was back on a mission in Afghanistan, mainlining on adrenaline, about to land my helicopter and a squad of marines in range of Taliban snipers and rocket grenades. Sometimes it was all about the risk.
Then I realized that I hadn’t checked on Kim and that she’d stopped whimpering. Fearing the worst, I twisted around fast and saw that she’d left her seat and gone back into the small cargo area to look out the rear door.
“Are you okay?” I yelled.
There was a flash of headlights behind us.
“Kim?”
She jerked her head around, mascara running down her cheeks, and said, “They’re coming.”
I undid my seat buckle and jumped into the back just as Louis took a hard left. It threw me off my feet and I crashed hard into the wall of the van, briefly stunned, until I saw Kim crawling toward me.
“Are you okay?” she asked, fighting back tears.
Over her shoulder, headlights glared through the rear window. There was a sharp cracking noise and the window blew out, showering us with little chunks of shatterproof glass.
“Get them off of us, Jack!” Louis yelled. “Before they take our tires!”
That jerked me back fully alert. Scrambling by Kim, I got to the back door. Crouched below the window frame, I reached up and pushed the Glock out the hole the shotgun had made. I tilted the pistol toward the headlights and pulled the trigger twice.
There was a screeching of tires and the headlights retreated.
I can’t give you every detail of the chase that ensued in the next few minutes because I haven’t the foggiest idea what roads we took or when we turned or where. For me there was only those headlights and trying to shoot them out every time they got close, while Louis tried to shake them.
“Merde!” Louis shouted at one point. “Hold on!”
Cars skidded and honked all around us.
Cars crashed all around us.
Chapter 8
LOUIS RAN A red light, and we shot up onto National Route 3 south of the town of Sevran. I got up to peer out the hole in the rear window and saw five demolished vehicles in the two hundred yards of road leading to the highway ramp. The Peugeot and the bald guy with the rotary-mag shotgun had somehow gotten through the pileup unscathed. We had put distance between us, but they were still coming, and coming hard.
“You got to go faster!” I yelled.
“I’m going as fast as a Mia goes!” Louis shouted. “Sixty-eight top speed.”
We were screwed. I didn’t know the top speed of the Peugeot, but it was a safe bet it was a whole lot more than sixty-eight. Kim must have been thinking much the same thing, because she shouted, “How far can we go?”
“Fifty-two more miles,” Louis said. “Plenty of power.”
I stood in the back of the van now, left hand pressed against the roof, and punched out the rest of the glass with the butt of the Glock. The Peugeot was back there less than a quarter of a mile, weaving through traffic.
Louis managed to stay ahead of them through the interchange onto autoroute 4, a three-lane freeway heading south. But the additional lane thinned traffic and the Peugeot took advantage of it, charging after us at eighty, ninety miles an hour. The crazy pale guy hanging out the window didn’t seem to care when I shot at him and missed.
He raised the shotgun with one hand. I dropped just in time. Buckshot clanked and pinged off the rear door. I was going to jump up and return fire but then noticed that the Glock’s slide was locked open. The pistol was empty.
I pivoted, stayed low, and duckwalked past Kim, who was on the floor of the van, holding tight to the legs of the jump seat with her eyes closed. Louis was hunched over the wheel like some pinball wizard. Grabbing the backs of the two front seats to stabilize myself, I said, “I’m out of ammo. I need your-”
“No time,” Louis barked as he cut the Mia hard left into the fast lane before the Peugeot could get up alongside us again.
In the next moment, everything seemed to move slower, and I was hyperaware of everything around us. There was a bloodred BMW coupe in our lane, three car lengths in front of us, just beyond the nose of a blue flatbed truck to our immediate right. Beyond the truck, in the far right lane and two car lengths ahead, a woman in a silver Mercedes sedan was singing with her radio. To our left the guardrail flickered in the headlights of the Peugeot, which was closing in fast.
We started up a rise. The flatbed downshifted and slowed. The BMW sped up, opening space. In the rearview, the bald, pale guy was aiming for our tires, and I held on tight, figuring we might be crashing in the next few seconds.
Without warning, Louis wrenched the wheel to his right. The bald guy shot and missed us, hitting the BMW’s tires instead. Our right rear quarter panel brushed the front bumper of the flatbed, which sent us careening into a clockwise 360-degree slide across the freeway.
It was surreal and blurred, almost like being in a helicopter when it’s going down. I held on for dear life, sure we were going to roll or collide hard with that Mercedes in the far right lane.
But Louis made a quick cut with the wheel and we missed broadsiding the Mercedes by inches. The van straightened out and we shot up the exit ramp for the D34 highway heading east.
I was shaking head to toe as we merged into Paris-bound traffic. In all my life I’d never seen a gutsier move than that one. Boxed inside the fast lane by the slower flatbed and the crippled BMW, the guys in the Peugeot never had a chance of following us.
Louis clenched his fist and smiled his wild smile at me again.
“That, Jack,” he said proudly, “is how a plumber drives in Paris.”
I laughed, but then heard Kim Kopchinski say in a strained voice, “They knew I was there. How did they know? How could they?”
“Don’t worry, Mademoiselle Kopchinski,” Louis said. “I’ll call some friends at La Crim. Get you protection that-”
“No!” Kim shouted. “You call in the police and you might as well shoot me right here, right now.”
Chapter 9
8th Arrondissement
8:30 p.m.
LOUIS LANGLOIS PULLED us over on the Rue du Boccador. A man wearing a white chef’s shirt and apron smoked a cigarette to one side of an open door, and a petite woman in a neat gray suit waited on the other side. Louis waved to her, and she made a small beckoning motion.
“Her name is Elodie,” Louis said. “She takes care of everything, Jack.”
“What is this place?” Wilkerson’s granddaughter asked before I slid back the Mia’s side door.
“Kitchen entrance to Alain Ducasse’s restaurant at the Plaza Athénée,” Louis said. “That door gives us access to the room service elevator. No one will know you are here. It’s how the famous and the infamous go in and out.”
Kim hesitated and then nodded to me. I opened the door and we moved quickly toward the hotel’s rear entrance. I’d stripped off the plumber’s coverall and retrieved my blue blazer so I fit in somewhat at the ritzy address in the heart of Paris’s fashion center. But Kim looked as though she’d been sleeping in her old clothes for days.
Elodie didn’t seem to care. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Morgan,” she said brightly, and then bowed to Kim. “Madame.”
The chef, a lean, handsome guy in his thirties, stubbed out his cigarette, smiled, and gestured toward the open door and the sounds of pans and dishes rattling. “Please,” he said.
Elodie led the way inside, and within seconds we were weaving through a state-of-the-art kitchen and a feverish pack of young men and women in white toques cleaning up after the evening service. Several of the kitchen staff glanced our way, but then saw the chef coming behind us and returned to their jobs with renewed vigor.